


This is How You Lose The Skeleton War

by historymiss



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, F/M, I only have one joke and this is it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:15:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26838067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: The first message is written in shards of iron-hard chitin, a black and scratchy missal that pierces through Gideon’s flesh and bleeds rusty trails down the wall of the Eden encampment.HOPE THIS KILLS YOU, FUCKER
Relationships: Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead/Gideon the First, Pyrrha Dve/Wake | Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead
Comments: 8
Kudos: 52





	This is How You Lose The Skeleton War

The first message is written in shards of iron-hard chitin, a black and scratchy missal that pierces through Gideon’s flesh and bleeds rusty trails down the wall of the Eden encampment.

_HOPE THIS KILLS YOU, FUCKER_

He writes his reply in the dust of what’s left, scrawling the words with the point of his rapier. It is not a good idea. But then again, he hasn’t had a good idea since he raised Pyrrha’s hand to his mouth, still wet with her blood, and bit down hard enough to crunch on the bone.

It is not, exactly, a taunt- more of a statement of fact, or perhaps a polite request.

_Try harder._

\-----

For her second message, she kicks him in the teeth, erupting out of the darkness of an alleyway in some necropolis that they thought would be safe- they thought the Blood of Eden would never be mad enough to try and have a foothold here, in a fortress of death.

Their mistake, Gideon thinks, ruefully, spitting out a thick salsa of blood and teeth. Commander Wake has been mad, in every sense of the word, since the day she was born.

Her feet skid little trails in the bone dust, eyes locked on his. Her grin, seen through the plex of her helmet, is feral, her hair escaping in little wisps like blood in water. She doesn’t have any further words, as the kick, the bitten off curse from Gideon, and the click as his jaw when out of alignment were message enough.

Gideon draws his rapier and listens for a moment to the long slither of it, metal sliding out of leather in the houses of the dead. 

They fight.

(Somewhere in the darkness of the mausoleum, let’s say that Gideon’s head is knocked, hard, against a pillar of vertebrae twisted and braided into a wide and rather unfortunately placed arch. Let’s say that when he opens his eyes, they are his once more. 

Let’s say that Wake sees this, and is for the first time confronted with the reality of what the Lyctors of the Emperor, his fists and gestures and deeds, truly are.

She sees those eyes, in that face, and recognises Pyrrha Dve (and Gideon) as something like her- a bomb, inside a body that will go on living despite all that the universe throws at it.

Commander Wake has done a lot of things that she shouldn’t, in her short and explosive life.  
One or two more won’t hurt.)

\----

Pyrrha Dve handles the reply, this time, a long line carved through her suit from elbow to wrist that leaves a jagged, smiling gash. Wake will never let it heal properly, fingering the raw edges of the skin until it becomes a hard-ridged scar that stands out like a cord of muscle against her skin. Better than a tattoo, she says, for remembrance. 

Her troops, her co-conspirators and apostles, think that she means another victory over the Emperor Undying.

In a way, they are right. 

The next time that they meet, Pyrrha runs Gideon’s tongue over the scar, the pink newly-grown flesh a smooth line under her mouth, and stops only when Wake scrubs her knuckles through the Lyctor’s close-cut hair. If it were longer, she would grab it: instead, her fingertips press almost hard enough to bruise.

Gideon finds himself awake in the ruins of a battlefield with a taste like salt and gunpowder in his mouth. 

That, he counts as message number four. It might be three. He is not the Saint of Precision, or Numbers, after all. 

\----

Message number five is left for her in the empty space between stars where a planet once hung, alive. A whole history, Wake’s history, or at least a part of it, turned to thanergy in a slow rotting from the core. Message six is eight necromantic adepts, choked on the viscera of their cavaliers, posed and placed to recall the religious icons that neither Gideon nor Pyrrha have ever much liked. They like Wake’s version, of course, even less.

They steal kisses, blood-tinged and full of teeth: they write messages in sweat and heat on each others’ skin. If Gideon wonders, sometimes, why she knows his body so well the first time that they fall, fighting, into the inevitable, well, maybe he’s just not remembering it right. 

It’s been a while, since Pyrrha.

\-----

The last message never comes. Gideon waits for it. Mouths the contents to himself, what must surely be the foregone conclusion. He thinks of the child inside her, and feels the slow, creeping cold curl up around his stomach. 

In a way, it is better that it never comes.

Gideon prefers to live with ghosts.


End file.
